Halloween Special - Prehistoric Art
I'll admit it up front - I'm not really a Halloween guy.
I enjoyed guising as a kid and getting raucously hammered as a student, but the actual widespread practice of the kitsch macabre doesn't really hold much appeal to me as an adult.k
I do enjoy a bit of horror now and then, but I thought I'd take a slighty different tack for this year's spooky posting - mildly unsettling thoughts that might rattle around your brain longer than you'd like, and may recontextualise your understanding of what it means to be a modern person.
Ok what I'm actually gonna do is talk about a bunch of stuff I saw on YouTube.
Stefan Milo is one of the best YouTubers
If you don't know, Stefan is an educational YouTuber focusing on ancient and prehistoric anthropology - how did we become the dominant species, what paths did we take around the world, what customs did we observe. What do we mean by "we"?
He has dozens of fascinating videos about active and underpublicised areas of research into ancient and prehistoric life and culture, but I'm going to focus on a topic that's become a bit of a psychological rabbit hole for me - Art.
I won't be citing him directly because it's hard to track down specific mentions in wide-reaching videos, but rest assured that he sent me down this rabbit hole.
The Prehistoric Art we have is really good
I can't get past this. As far as properly prehistoric stuff, going back over 10,000 years there are dozens of sites out there, cave paintings, carvings, artefacts, jewellery, ritual objects.
The classic cave paintings have this incredible artistic eye and understanding of dynamics.
| Drawing of rhinos at Chauvet cave - This shit is 30,000 years old
These drawings of animals are found within caves with no view of them, so would require either reference sketches or being done totally from memory. They were often drawn using charcoal from the fires that were the only light source inside the caves. The technical proficiency on show is so much higher than our preconceptions about "cavemen."
The stuff that really fucks me up though is the sculpture.
| The Venus of Brassempouy - A 25,000* year old mammoth ivory carving of a human head
Something about a carving from 1,000 generations ago being so acceptably accurate and stylised and evocative of a human face gives me pause. There are a bunch of these Venus statues contemporary with it but they tend to be more figurative - beautiful objects in their own right, but nothing has been found that's quite as arresting as this one.
What gets me is that we have so little shit art preserved in the archaeological record. There are a pair of opposing ideas in prehistoric archaeology that I think highlight this.
- The vast majority of artefacts are lost to us, so anything we find is likely to have been relatively common in its time.
- Objects of value or importance are more likely to be kept in places like burials were we can find and contextualise them, so objects we find are likely to be special in their time.
Best I can tell, untangling this is one of the key jobs of the paleo-archaeologist.
I find it wild that the artists whose work we find is so consistently in a state we'd call "beautiful", even if it's unfinished (as the Venus above may well be). I'd love to see examples of shit art - mistakes that are crudely covered over or scribbled out, an unintentionally dodgy carving of a cow, a static stick figure with a cock and balls graffiti'd on.
I can't be the only one stunned by this stuff
Maybe I'm misreading the room - maybe everyone assumed cave-dwelling humans were this skillful in their crafts. I certainly knew intellectually that they were no less intelligent, creative, or interested in the world around them than we are, but it was hard to add to that the expectation that they'd have the time and inclination to hone a craft like this in what was a much harder lifestyle than we can imagine today. I sit with these thoughts for a significant portion of my downtime lately.
I often consider the idea of the paths I could have travelled in life, but as much as it fascinates me now I don't think my teenage self would have ever considered a career in archaeology so this doesn't really feel that way. This is very much a preoccupation of my adult brain.
* Just handling the asterisk here - the date seems a bit unconvincing at first when you start reading about the excavation of the Cave of the Pope it was found in - we're talking 1890s archaeology here, so it was a shitshow. This paper (link shamelessly poached from wikipedia) explores the topic in detail, gives some context on the people doing the work, and verifies (to my satisfaction as a lay person at least) a dating of "Middle Gravettian" - around 25,000 years ago.
They also point out how the biases of the archaeologists have them calling in a Venus when there's no indication of sex to the figure. I love to think there was some prehistoric twink with a cool hairdo getting his portrait carved in a cave in France, and the sculpture couldn't help but make him beautiful.